Clicking repeatedly and getting no feedback is now the sign of our times. How can we design digital and social systems that avoid dead-end rage and enable new and unexpected affordances for action?
You struggle through an online form… It takes forever. You finally make it to the submit button.
Click once, nothing happens.
Click again, still nothing.
Click a few more times…
Whether on your phone, your mouse or your keyboard, you may have already “rage clicked” a few times today. It all happened so fast, and a second later you forgot about it. But rage you did, and rightfully so.
Rage clicks are not click-baits, they are not deliberately designed to enrage you. In most cases they represent rare points of momentary friction within otherwise highly controlled interaction flows. These hiccups often happen due to a technical lag or a gap between the user’s anticipation and the system’s design.
The term ‘rage click’ is used by behavior analytics tools, like Full Story, HotJar and Clarity. These tools provide recorded interaction sessions that can show where users rage clicked, so any momentary discomfort can be addressed, restoring the consistent and predictable flow.
Filtering for rage clicks from user session recorded on Full Story
It seems our attention spans have shrunk to the few milliseconds that are enough to trigger a second, a third, a fourth click… It is tempting to lament this digital impatience, how we demand everything served to us immediately with a click of a button. It is all true, but it is not the full story. If we dig underneath these momentary hiccups, we may discover not only how controlled and disempowering these systems have become, but also some opportunities to redesign our agency within both digital and social systems.
Stuck in a black box
Clicking countless buttons every day has become a natural part of our lives. But there’s really nothing natural about it.
In 1966 psychologist James J. Gibson suggested the term affordance as the space of possibility between an animal and its environment. For example, a rabbit in an environment with soft soil has an affordance to dig a hole. If the rabbit is too young, too old, too tired, or too sick, that affordance would likely change. If we pave the soil with cement, that affordance will change as well.
psychologists James J. Gibson and Don Norman (by Paolo Sacchi)
In 1988 Don Norman introduced the term affordance to the design of other, less natural worlds, and his version of affordance theory has become a core component of the design terminology. However, 25 years later, Norman confessed: “…affordances have created much confusion in the world of design. Affordances define what actions are possible. Signifiers specify how people discover those possibilities.”
Rage clicking is what happens when the signifier is no longer attached to the affordance. You clicked the right signifier, expected a response, but received nothing, the feedback never came, and the affordance is nowhere to be found… Maybe the button was clicked, maybe it wasn’t… Maybe that form was submitted, maybe it wasn’t… How would you know?
You have become that rabbit, but you are now stuck in a box. You can no longer smell the ground or feel it in your paws, let alone dig yourself out. The lever you pulled did not dispense food, and it did not open the box. The ground underneath you is gone. Stuck within the cold black box, this irresponsive interface layer remains your last signifier to reality. You pull the lever again and again in rage and despair.
Though short and fleeting, the rage click is at best Kafkaesque and at worst a locked-in syndrome — you’re aware of your reality but have lost the ability to affect it. This is you microdosing on pure horror.
The growing gap between our capacity for action (affordance) and how we perceive it (signifier) is evident in both digital systems and in social ones. In 2011, Occupy Wall Street protesters set up camp outside the iconic center of global trade. However, they chose not to enter, realizing that stepping inside would do nothing — as the affordance for change isn’t really there. A decade later, Trump supporters forcibly entered the Capitol building, embodying the age-old trope of masses storming a citadel of power. They acted based on what they perceived as a signifier for political affordance, as if breaching this symbolic barrier would solidify their political influence. Looking back, we may say that more than anything, January 6 was a rage click. And similarly, after the October 7th Hamas attack and the following Israeli onslaught on Gaza, both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protests around the world may be passionately righteous, yet mostly futile rage clicks — symbolic actions driven by perceived signifiers of influence but lacking clear paths towards tangible change.
more than anything, January 6 was a rage click
Unboxing
Losing the only connection between our perception of the system and our ability to change it, leaves us powerless. However, addressing these disparities may unveil new avenues for action. For example, when hackers manipulate a system to perform a function beyond its intended design, they discover a new previously un-signified affordance for action.
Less than a year after Occupy Wall Street protestors packed up their last tents, some of them found a new affordance for action — one that had never been clearly signified. Debt Collective activists decided to hack the unregulated secondary lending market by taking on the role of debt collectors themselves. They fundraised and bought defaulted loans for Penny on the Dollar, and then simply dissolved them. They identified a real affordance for change within the financial system. Debtors received a festive red box in the mail with a letter that read: ”You no longer owe the balance of this debt. It is gone, a gift with no strings attached.”
Strike Debt’s red box & activists marching under the banner “Your Are Not A Loan”
Other hacks may subvert political systems in different ways. The controversial practice of Gerrymandering redraws American voting district borders to manipulate national elections beyond the equal vote. It has been referred to as a way for politicians to pick their voters instead of the other way round.
These hacks are not only “thinking outside the box,” they expose the mechanisms that created the box in the first place. But if the box is designed in this particular way, we can choose to design it otherwise. We must pierce beyond the symbolic barriers and engage more directly with the affordances of the system.
For decades, digital interfaces have funneled us down lubricated predictable flows, with every affordance packaged into a neatly signified button. But recently the digital landscape has taken a new turn for the weird. Generative text-based models (like ChatGPT) represent new uncharted territories. No button you click will get you exactly what you expected. The affordances of these “AI” systems are not clearly signified and, at this point, are also not very efficient. Like rabbits, with every textual prompt we have to smell the soil and feel the ground underneath our keyboards. We may not be getting exactly what we had in mind, but we’re digging new holes and occasionally discover new unexpected affordances.
However these new exploratory design-patterns do little to deliver us from our submissive and deterministic relationship with technology. Especially as the costs to our environment, our labor, our culture and our democracies remain buried deep underneath the soft soils of these shiny sweet-talking sandboxes.
A true break from predetermined, closed and controlling systems design is gravely needed. It starts by digging beyond the layer of signifiers to a deeper field of affordances. It continues with designing true non-deterministic interaction flows that encourage both individual and collective agency. Both online and off, another world is possible, but we won’t get there by repeatedly pushing the same buttons.
Further reading:
Gibson, J. J. (1979). The theory of affordances. In The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (pp. 127–143). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Bruineberg, J., & Rietveld, E. (2014). “Self-organization, free energy minimization, and optimal grip on a field of affordances.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 599.Norman, D. A. (1988). The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books.Davis, J. L. (2020). How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things. MIT Press.Debt Collective, Taylor, A. (2020). Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition. Haymarket Books.
Further viewing:
For further exploration of these themes check my talk documentation at RISD:
https://medium.com/media/6fab1f63a9fcbc15c9558dee09d1d6b1/hrefJoin my MD24 session with designer and writer mo husseini: Decoupling the pen and the sword
Rage clicks are microdoses of pure horror was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
